


Eat Men Like Air

by mechafly



Category: Bleach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 10:30:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4056709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechafly/pseuds/mechafly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hisana wakes up one morning as a zombie, and a great deal has passed while she was dead.</p><p>--</p><p>She learned a great deal about the world she'd left behind and what had happened in her centuries of absence. Rukia had been found but that had only been the beginning. There'd been a man named Kurosaki Ichigo who'd saved her, battled a God, battled a whole army of enemies, killed the Spirit King, and generally assumed a great deal of power. He'd died too, eventually. Hisana was, as they said in the modern parlance, late to the party.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eat Men Like Air

Hisana woke up with a fist through the earth of her grave. 

Her first action upon waking back into her life was to claw the remaining earth out of her way. She lay on the muddied ground, wheezing, propping herself up on her own mossed-over tombstone.

Her second action was to shake awake the person who'd apparently fainted in front of her grave It was a man, a tall one, with lots of red hair and strange tattoos. He had a curious appearance, his name was Renji, and he'd been visiting her grave every single night. Not her grave. The one beside hers.

Renji was currently giving Byakuya's tombstone a baleful look. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. "Is he going to wake up too?"

Hisana shook her head.

"Are you a zombie?"

"I'm the undead, if that's what you're asking."

Renji stared at her, shook his head severely, and sighed.

 

 

They went to visit another man whom Hisana vaguely remembered: a Shinigami with shifty eyes under his permanently messy blond hair. His name was Urahara Kisuke and he was a zombie too. 

"I swear I didn't mean to start a zombie apocalypse," Kisuke rambled. Renji groaned into his hands. Hisana changed into some newer, tighter clothes and discovered that her body seemed healthy and strong.

"This is good. This is very good." Renji and Urahara watched somewhat distractedly as she tested out her body with a series of exercises. "Thank you to your friend for the clothes, though I fear they are a little small." Hisana thanked Urahara. Both Urahara and Renji turned red for some reason. 

"What are you going to do now?" Renji asked her later. He was giving her a lot of curious looks but he also seemed afraid. 

"Look for Rukia," Hisana said automatically, then paused. Urahara had told her that Rukia had been long found, and was long dead. Renji looked even more afraid than previously. "I don't know. What's on Earth these days?" Urahara had complained of his long trip up to Soul Society. 

Renji shrugged. "Humans killing each other; music; cool clothes."

"Sounds good to me."

 

 

 

Hisana began to live with Urahara Kisuke on his little slice of Soul Society in a quiet dusty town on Earth. She learned a great deal about the world she'd left behind and what had happened in her centuries of absence. Rukia had been found but that had only been the beginning. There'd been a man named Kurosaki Ichigo who'd saved her, battled a God, battled a whole army of enemies, killed the Spirit King, and generally assumed a great deal of power. He'd died too, eventually. Hisana was, as they said in the modern parlance, late to the party.

"Did he love her?" Hisana was watching the city lights play across the rooftops from her vantage point on Urahara's rickty little roof. Urahara gave her a sharp look but he didn't ask who.

"I think so." 

Hisana accepted the answer. She learned to read well enough to decipher the name on that big cross-shaped gravestone (because it was a gravestone) in Urahara's dusty old yard. It said, "Shihouin Yoruichi". She didn't remember any such person from her former life as a Shinigami captain's wife but she could infer that they'd meant a great deal to Urahara. After all, he'd named his black cat after his dead friend.

The cat Yoruichi and Urahara were Hisana's only friends for a very, very long time.

 

 

 

Eventually Hisana got tired of the life Urahara lived. Despite being a zombie he was far more functional than the average human or Shinigami, and he spent all his time in his basement testing weird inventions, or else napping on the porch out in the front, with Yoruichi the cat curled up asleep on his chest.

Hisana went out to explore the world. It was an advantage to have such a young, strong body (so different from the dying one she'd inhabited for her frail last days as Byakuya's wife). She could go anywhere, do anything. Urahara gave her an improbably amount of human money and she wandered the world. She say things humans called 'movies' where they brought their strangest fantasies to life. She ate strange foods and met strange people. She bought cool clothes and she listened to music. Hisana really loved the music. Its strangeness and its sparseness were totally alien to her old ears but the youth of this futuristic, sad Japan living at what seemed to her to be the cusp of the end of the world, they loved this music. Perhaps it reminded them of the ephemeral nature of their own lives. Perhaps it helped them forget.

She went back to Urahara's dusty small shop after a long time of travel. He greeted her like she'd never been gone, but truth be told he seemed relieved to see her. Hisana was relieved to see him as well. "Kisuke."

"Hisana."

 

 

 

"You haven't asked for anything."

"Such as?" It was the height of summer, and Hisana was stretched out on Kisuke's porch, wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else, in the shade, eating slices of watermelon. Her hair was growing too long and sticking to her face again.

"Such as... Bringing Rukia back to life? Or Byakuya? Or going up to Soul Society again?"

Hisana pulled seeds out of her watermelon. "They lived long and happy lives. I'm glad for them. I wouldn't wish eternal life on them, never to escape the cycle of rebirth. That's a curse more than a blessing." Kisuke accepted the point that they were both damned to eternal life with good grace. "And what's in Soul Society for me? It's a fucked up place. I hated it the minute I died and some Shinigami sent us up there."

 

 

 

They probably could have stayed in that dusty little shop until the end of time. Hisana did small errands since Kisuke was often unwilling to leave the shop, and made friends with the neighbours, and terrorised the local kids. Kisuke made weird adventures and monsters that he was occasionally required to fight off while Hisana napped with Yoruichi the cat curled up under her arm. The three of them could have stayed for a long, long, long time but events, unfortunately, conspired to interrupt.


End file.
